Dia 3: Vincente Guerrero, BC, Mexico

We passed our first checkpoints today.  The first was the Federales, but it was unmanned.  The second was a military check point.  They asked where we had come from (last night) and where we are going (today).  That was all, and they let us through.

The roads haven't turned out to be quite as bad as described, at least not so far.  Large sections of Mex 1 have recently been overhauled to standards similar to those of US Highways, parts are still under construction and parts are narrow and in fair to bad shape.  Even the latter appear to be a bit wider than the 19 feet reported in our guide book.  Most of what we saw today was no worse than a lot of places that we have cycled in the last couple of years.  But the wild card is the handful of maniac drivers down here, which creates a lot of uncertainty about how safe it would be to ride the route.  I don't think it poses any insurmountable challenges for anyone touring self-supported (as long as you have some way of keeping an eye on what is happening behind you), but for our style of touring the limited ability to get the van off the highway (due to the low shoulders) is very problematic.

Incoming Kamikaze! 

There is a lot of traffic hidden in all that dust!

A lot of the communities along Mex 1 have a wide dirt/sand area between the highway and rows of stores.  This is used as a sort of parking lot, frontage road and/or outside display area.  Cars go in all directions, there are lots of pedestrians everywhere, more than a few vendors with push carts and clouds of dust make it just a bit more difficult to keep track of everything that is going on.

The up side of no longer cycling our way south is that our choice of campsites isn't dictated by how far we can ride each day.  Now we can ride far enough to get to the next best campsite, rather than settling for whatever happens to be a day's ride from the previous night's stop.

Speaking of cycling, we have yet to see any touring cyclists on the road.  But then again, we've also seen very few RVers on the road.  And tonight is shaping up not to be an exception to that rule.  There are several permanent residents here, but out of the other 100 or so campsites here we, in the late afternoon, are the only guests.

We are camped at Posada Don Diego (295$, power, water and hot showers), which is located about a half mile from Mex 1, on a very rough gravel road.  The price of the campsite (roughly $16-$17 US, based upon the exchange we got a couple of days ago, but I think it is more like $15 at the current rate) included two free (but very tiny) margaritas.  So we ate at the restaurant.  I had a huge fish entree with octopus and sea snails and Alea had grilled shrimp.  We got a free appetizer and garlic bread, had soup and two large margaritas for less than $28 US.  The meal was excellent and the entrees alone would have cost us that much in most parts of the US (if you can even find any place with sea snails on the menu).

The power here is actually grounded, and when we tested the circuit it was a steady 119/120v.  So it is the cleanest power we've seen thus far.

There are a lot of loose dogs here, though only three seem to patrol the campground area.  Lana tried to chase off the alpha male, and luckily he didn't challenge her (though we interceded before he had a chance to change his mind).  At the end of the campground closest to the Posada the poop is policed fairly well.  At the far end it is a different story, but I doubt that end of the campground ever gets used.  The bigger issue with dogs is that one of them would bark continuously at night for long periods of time.  Lana seemed to sleep all night long undisturbed, but it did wake Alea and me up a couple of times during the night.

One of the things our guide book warns about is whether the water is safe to drink.  They really don't know that the water is unsafe, just that Montezuma's Revenge has to come from something, and water is something that gets used a lot.  They recommend superchlorination for the water that we store on board our camper - adding a teaspoon of bleach for every 10 gallons of water.  We aren't completely convinced that this is necessary, when all we use this water for is cooking and brushing our teeth (though we do buy bottled water for drinking).  It is clear that there is a lot of money going into improving infrastructure here, and the water is likely to be safe in more communities as time goes on.

Today was the first time that we needed to add water, so we decided try superchlorination.  Being our first time, we had not thought about when the bleach should be added until after we had filled the tank.  Wrong.  Adding the bleach first assures that it is mixed well with whatever water remains in the tank.  So I had to open the tank valves and drive down the street about a quarter of a mile to drain off enough water to make room for the bleach to be added.  We put the teaspoon of bleach in a bicycle water bottle and sprayed the contents though our funnel and into the holding tank.  We put our water filter on our outboard water spigot, so that we can filter out the extra chlorine before using the water.

We ran into one guy who has been on the Peninsula for several winters and he is dubious of this procedure.  He said that more than once he has filled from a municipal water supply that was highly chlorinated and that superchlorination put way too much chlorine in the water.  But there are towns where the source of water is unknown, being trucked in from some unknown place.  He uses Agua 2000 water (a coin-operated water vending machine found in a lot of the larger towns) for his drinking water.

Our guide book doesn't note that there is much of interest along this current stretch of our route south, aside from some mission ruins.  And since they were built of adobe, they now aren't much more than melted blobs of mud.  But we did pass huge cultivated areas under fabric shades - it sort of looks like they are growing medical marijuana.  That's just speculation (but we did see a building in the area that clearly had some connection to marijuana), but it might explain why the guide book recommends only camping at campgrounds in this area.  It seems there is a crime problem associated with the workers who come to work in those fields. 

We did manage to get our Republic cell phones switched over to wi-fi only calling and data.  A big benefit is that the phone batteries last a lot longer now, since they aren't constantly pinging cell towers, trying to find one that works with our plan.